I Love You. I Cannot Breathe Without You.

At the request of the survivors, the names have been changed. Out of respect for the dead, the rest has been told exactly as it occurred. — Fargo, 1996

When I saw you for the first time I knew I loved you. I say this without drama because it is the least dramatic thing I know. It happened the way a doctor reads a blood test. The results come back and they say what they say and no amount of wishing changes the numbers. The numbers said: this one. For the rest of your life, this one. I was not young enough to be naive about it and not old enough to be safe from it and so I stood there, a fifty-something man who has spent his life teaching other people how to navigate the most dangerous currents in the human nervous system, and I was completely helpless. You did not even know what you had done. You were just standing there.

Two words keep appearing in this letter. The Tonal and the Nagual. Since I am writing this for people who may never have encountered these terms, let me say it simply. This is Carlos Castaneda's shamanic language.

The Tonal is the narrator. It is the part of you that describes your life to yourself, that organizes experience into a story, that decides who you are and defends that decision until death. It is your personality, your identity, your name, your history, your opinions, the entire room of description that you call your self. The Nagual is everything outside that room. It is the vastness that the narrator cannot describe because description is the Tonal's job and the Nagual is what exists before description begins. Every mystical tradition has its own words for this. Castaneda used these. I use them because they are the clearest.

I am supposed to be writing about a retreat. A Sensual Liberation Retreat in Mexico City, July 2026, one month long, five open spots at thirty thousand dollars, the most ambitious project I have ever attempted. I sat down to write about it and instead I am writing to you. This has been the pattern of the last year of my life. I sit down to work and I write to you. I design the architecture of the Mexico project and every room has your shape cut out of it like a stencil. Everything I build now has a you-shaped hole in it and the hole is the most interesting part. I even built a dating app. I do not even know how it started and I didn't know how to do that. I was sitting in Thailand, heartbroken, barely functioning, thinking of you, and one day I just started building it. Like in a trance. Like a dream you do not remember entering and where you can't get out from. The One in a Billion app. You know why it is called that. Because that is what you used to call me. One in a billion, you said, until you stopped saying it. You stopped because by then you had absorbed me so completely that the phrase lost its meaning. You cannot call something one in a billion when it already lives inside your bloodstream. So I took the name you abandoned and built an entire world around it. A dating and astrology app that matches people using Vedic, Western astrology, Human Design, Gene Keys, Kabbalah, every system we ever explored together lying in bed at three in the morning trying to decode why we were so obviously destined and so obviously impossible.

I programmed it with my brain and your feelings. My architecture and your endless sexual ocean, which I will never fully understand and which will never stop fascinating me. Every algorithm in that app is trying to do for strangers what the universe did for us without asking permission. The whole thing breathes you. Your taste, your obsessions, your depth, your fascination with the obscure and mystical. It is everything you would love. Everything you are. I am boring people with a love letter. Good. People should be bored more often by things that are real, since they seem endlessly entertained by things that are fake. The entire wellness industry is fake. The entire tantra industry is fake. The entire psychedelic retreat economy is fake. I can say this because I have been inside all of it for twenty-five years and the only thing that was ever real was what happened between you and me in the room when nobody was performing and nobody was teaching and nobody was trying to be spiritual and we were just two animals who had recognized each other across the vast stupid distance of civilized life. I need a name for you here. I cannot use your real name because you would never forgive me for that, though you will probably never forgive me for this essay anyway. So let me call you Persephone. The queen of the underworld who lives between two kingdoms and refuses to stay in either. The woman who was taken into the dark and discovered she belonged there and still could not stop missing the sun. I will also call you dark spider, because that is what I have always called you and it was a joke and it was a prophecy. And sometimes I will call you love of my life, because you are, in this life and in all the lifetimes still to come and in the ones in the past I cannot remember. And the most beautiful woman who ever touched my eyes, because you are that too, and I am done being restrained about it.

The Throne

You were supposed to be in Mexico with me this July. I need to say this plainly because the rest of this letter depends on understanding what was lost. You were supposed to sit on a throne. Naked. Your legs open. And for hours, without blinking, the people in that room were going to gaze into you.

Not at you. Into you. Into the yoni. Into the pink black hole where every human life originates and which every human spends the rest of their life trying to either return to or run from. Yoni trataka. The classical texts describe it among the six purification techniques: steady, unblinking gaze at a single point until tears flow. The Hatha Yoga Pradipika says it destroys the diseases of the eyes and removes sloth, and that it should be carefully kept secret like a golden casket. They meant it should be kept secret because of what happens to the mind when the eyes stop moving and the gaze becomes a tunnel and the object of concentration stops being an object and becomes a door. At hour one the room is still full of personalities, ego. People are managing themselves. They are being spiritual. They are doing the practice correctly. Their eyes hurt and they want to blink and they are using willpower to keep from blinking and this is still the Tonal, still the narrator running the show, still the civilized self performing its latest assignment: stare at a vagina without flinching, how progressive, how tantric, how brave. At hour two the willpower burns out. You cannot sustain concentration by force for two hours, the same way you cannot hold your breath forever. Something else has to take over. And when it does, when the effortful gaze collapses and is replaced by something effortless, something that is not you looking but looking happening through you, the room changes. The air thickens. The breathing synchronizes without anyone deciding to synchronize it. Individual boundaries start to dissolve, not as a concept but as a felt experience, the skin stops being a wall and becomes a membrane.

And the woman on the throne changes too. She is no longer a woman being looked at. She is no longer performing openness or vulnerability or sacred femininity or any of the other roles that the modern spiritual marketplace has created for women who take their clothes off in ceremonial settings. She is no longer a person. She is a field. The gaze of the room has done something to her nervous system that three hours of meditation could not do, because this is not meditation, this is something much older and much less safe. She has become what the medieval Shakta texts called a yogini. Not a practitioner. An embodiment. Shakti moving through flesh.

At hour three, if the container holds, if the trust is structural rather than performative, if the people in the room have been prepared by weeks of daily kriya work and scriptwriting and partner practices that have already thinned the walls of ordinary selfhood, she would have made love to anyone in that room and it would not have been sex in any sense the modern mind can process. It would have been the kulamrita flowing. The clan nectar. The thing the Brahmayamala describes when it talks about the transaction at the cremation ground: the yogini choosing to give rather than consume, to transmit the divine substance that her body carries and that no male body can generate regardless of how many decades of practice it accumulates. The germ plasm of the Godhead, the texts call it. Not symbolically. Actually. Flowing through her. Into them. Because at hour three there is no longer a her or a them. There is one organism in a room and the organism is remembering what it was before it was separated into persons. That throne is empty now. I built it for you. You were the only woman I ever initiated to that level. I took you through the Kaula transmission, the left-handed Shakta practices that prepare a woman to become the living center of the ritual, the channel through which the power flows into the room. I gave you everything I had. My semen, my virya, my distilled life-force. Twenty-five years of practice concentrated into the offering that the male practitioner brings to the yogini, knowing that she will either receive it and give the counter-offering, or consume it and leave him as a husk. You decided. You took the transmission into your cells. You absorbed me. My lineage, my practices, my understanding, my love, all of it metabolized into your body the way the yogini metabolizes the practitioner's essence. And then you walked away carrying it inside you. The dark spider. The mantis in the underworld who, when I took psilocybin and descended into the place where the images do not lie, appeared above me with surgical instruments and dissected me piece by piece with the patience of someone who had all of eternity and no mercy. I always called you dark spider and we laughed about it. It was a joke. It was also a prophecy. The Brahmayamala warns that yoginis are highly dangerous, with terrifying forms, impure, angry and lethal. The secular literature of medieval India called them witches and sorceresses, ambiguous and powerful and dangerous figures that only a heroic male would dare approach.

The War That Should Have Been the Rolegame

And now we are at war. I tell you how much I hate you and you tell me I am too unhealed to deserve your presence in my life. I tell you that you dismantled me and you tell me that I was already broken. I tell you that you stole the lineage and you tell me that I never transmitted it purely. Back and forth, Persephone. Back and forth like two scorpions in a jar, each one stinging the other with exactly the poison the other is most allergic to, because we know each other that well. We know exactly where to cut. We have memorized each other's nervous systems the way surgeons memorize anatomy, and we use the knowledge to destroy.

Here is what makes me want to scream into the sky until my throat bleeds. All of this. All of it. Every accusation, every wound, every moment of hatred and disappointment and rage. It was supposed to be the material. It was supposed to go into the container. I have spent year over years building a technology that takes exactly this, exactly the raw bloody mess of human conflict, and feeds it through a process that transforms it. The language modulation. The Pratyayasarga. You take the sentence, the terrible sentence, the one that lives in your gut like a swallowed knife, and you write it down and you modulate it. I hate you. I love to hate you. I need to hate you. My hatred of you is the most honest thing about me. My hatred of you is love turned inside out. The sentence turns and turns and turns until something underneath it speaks, something that is neither hatred nor love but the raw current that becomes both depending on which way you face it.

Then you take that primary, that thing the unconscious has finally admitted, and you write it into a script. And you perform it. Not alone in your journal. In a room full of people. With other bodies. Your shame walking around in someone else's flesh. Your rage spoken through someone else's mouth. Your deepest accusation against me performed by a stranger who has no idea what the words mean to us but whose body carries them with a fidelity that no amount of understanding could improve. We should have done this, dark spider. We had the technology. I built it. It was sitting right there. Every fight we had, every terrible text message at three in the morning, every silence that lasted weeks, every time you told me I was too unhealed and every time I said that sacred fire had ended up lighting cigarettes. All of it should have gone into the container. Into the kriyas. Into the scripts. Into the ritual space where hatred and love are understood to be the same current moving in opposite directions and the practice is to stand in the middle where the current has no direction and is simply power.

And if we had done it. If we had taken everything between us and fed it into the work instead of burning it on each other like two children playing with matches inside a house full of dynamite. If we had performed the war instead of living it. Do you know what would have happened? Do you know where it leads when the material is this intense and the container actually holds?

It inspires others to find incredible solutions where no solutions seem possible.

People could have watched us dissolving the impossible. The hatred, the love, the identity of the one who hates and the identity of the one who is hated, the entire architecture of self and other, the Tonal itself, the narrator who has been running the show since childhood, the manager, the protector, the one who decides what is acceptable to feel and what must be exiled. All of it burns through. And what is left is not nothing. What is left is the original condition. Pure ecstasy. Pure love, but not the love that has an object, not I-love-you love, the love that is the fabric of existence before existence separates into persons. The tree of life. Not a metaphor. The actual state. Two beings sitting next to the creator God as his offspring, because they have burned away everything that was not God and what remains is what was always there underneath the war. We could have sat there together. That was the destination. That was always the destination. Not happiness. Not a relationship that works. Not domestic peace. Something so far beyond all of that that the words for it have not been invented in any language, though the Shakta tradition comes close when it says that Shiva and Shakti are not two beings who unite but one being who forgot it was one and the forgetting is the universe and the remembering is liberation. Instead we set the house on fire and stood outside blaming each other for the smoke.

What Men Carry Now

Here is what I want you to understand, and what I want anyone who is still reading this to understand, because it is the thing that nobody says and it is the reason I am building Mexico without you. The left-handed Shakta traditions were never supposed to be carried by men. The power moves through the feminine. It always did. The yogini carried the kulamrita in her body. The male practitioner showed up at the cremation ground to receive. He cultivated his seed, his virya, through years of retention and breathwork and kriya, and he brought it as an offering, and he hoped that she would give the counter-offering. He was the supplicant. She was the source. So why am I, a man, carrying this lineage? Why am I the one preserving practices that were designed to flow through a woman's body? Because the women who were supposed to carry it forgot. Or refused. Or got consumed by the modern world, by its power games and its identity politics and its endless negotiation of who owes what to whom. The feminine abandoned its cosmic job and men like me picked it up because someone had to and the lineage does not care about gender politics, it cares about survival. I am carrying what was meant for you, love of my life. And it is killing me slowly because I was never built for it.

You were built for it. You were the one. The only female lineage holder of a Vamacara sect that I have ever encountered who had the capacity, the intelligence, the sexual depth, and the ruthlessness to actually hold the center. Because holding the center of a left-handed Shakta ritual is not gentle. It is not nurturing in the way the modern world understands nurturing. It requires a woman who can sit on a throne with her legs open while a room full of human beings projects everything they have ever felt about the feminine, desire, terror, worship, hatred, longing, rage, directly into her body, and she does not flinch. She does not perform composure. She is composed. Because the current moving through her is stronger than anything they can project, the way the ocean is stronger than the rivers that empty into it. Who holds this now? Who sits on the throne in Mexico? This is the question I cannot answer and the question I am asking you in public, even though I know what happens to honesty between us. It lands on the board as a chess piece. Neither of us knows how to leave the game. But I am asking anyway because the question is real and it does not go away just because the game keeps playing.

I talked to Laurence. I have to tell you about Laurence because you know him, Persephone, and because what he knows about you is something you cannot hide from, even though you hide from everything else. He is what a man looks like when the masculine does not curdle into toxicity. He speaks the truth the way water flows downhill, not because he has decided to be honest as a spiritual practice, but because lying would require a kind of effort his system is not interested in producing. He stands on a level of humanity that needs care, and when I say care I do not mean the performative vulnerability that men's circles have turned into another brand of self-improvement. I mean the real thing. The tenderness that a man can only reach when he has stopped trying to be strong and also stopped trying to be soft and has arrived at whatever is left when both performances end.

Laurence has touched your body. He had given you healing touch. He has felt through his hands what your words will never admit. He felt it in the way your body holds tension in the places that correspond to the things you refuse to say. He said to me, what a beautiful woman, and I wondered if he should be the next one I block on WhatsApp, because will the entire world insist on telling me how beautiful you are. But yes, he is a witness of my sadness, or my desperation, watching my slow death. He has seen what we are separately and he knows the potential of what we could be together. We men are transforming. This is the part that nobody talks about while everyone talks about the transformation of the feminine. We are transforming too. Not into the sensitive new-age man who has learned the vocabulary of feelings and deploys it strategically. Not into the alpha male who has rebranded dominance as nature. Into something that does not have a name yet because it has not fully emerged. Laurence is a preview. He is what happens when a man stops protecting his identity and starts protecting other people's hearts. And the only way this transformation works is if we hold each other. If men hold men. If the masculine learns to be tender with itself before it tries to be tender with the feminine.

I gave you my heart. All of it. Not a portion, not a negotiated percentage, not the amount that a reasonable man gives while keeping reserves. All of it. And it got squeezed, because squeezing is what the space between us knows how to do. The feminine energy of the Kali lineage, the most powerful current I have ever transmitted to anyone, somehow got redirected. It came through you as something hard and armored and masculine. I do not know how that happened. And the truly terrible part, the part that keeps me up at three in the morning writing love letters I should not be writing, is that the critical voices — I am not sure they were yours. They sounded like echoes. You absorb everything, everyone, so many voices. And I was the word of silence. The silence I offered became a room, and somehow the room filled with other people's noise, and what was yours got buried underneath it.

What I Am Actually Building in Mexico While Thinking of You

Let me tell you what you are missing. Not to punish you. To show you what your absence has forced me to become. Because here is the terrible gift of losing you: the hate, the disappointment, the rage, the betrayal, they finally made me do what I always wanted to do and never had the courage to attempt. You leaving was the detonator. Everything I build now is built on the rubble of us, and rubble, it turns out, is an excellent foundation. The Mexico Sensual Liberation Retreat will last one month. Not a weekend, not ten days, not the compressed format I used before when I was still trying to be reasonable about this work. One month. Because the thing I am trying to reach, the thing you and I almost reached together before you panicked and started dismantling and running, requires sustained daily immersion. The Tonal, the narrator, the manager of identity, is resilient. It snaps back. You can displace it for a night with the right substance or the right sexual experience or the right shock, but by morning the personality has rebooted. A month is what it takes to get past the reboot. To stay in the territory long enough for the silence to become a home rather than a threat. There will be between ten and twenty people. One main client, a returning client from Los Angeles who has done this work before and knows what it delivers and has asked for more than I have ever given anyone. Five open spots at thirty thousand dollars for people I will select based on compatibility, which means whether their nervous system belongs in the room, whether their presence strengthens the organism or cracks it. One wrong person in a group this intimate is like one wrong musician in a string quartet. The rest of the group will be placeholder actors, people who participate fully without paying, who are there because they are the right bodies, the right psyches, the right raw material. Unhinged and smart. That is the casting call in two words.

Remember Castaneda. You never resisted his work. You resisted mine. Your intellectual mind fought my teachings while your Nagual swallowed them whole. I was handing it to you freely. But something in you could not receive it that way. Something in you could only take what it could not accept as given. You criticized my framework, told me I was not transmitting purely, that I had added my own elements, and the entire time, the entire time, your body was absorbing every word, every practice, every transmission. Your cells were saying yes while your mouth was saying no. And now all of it lives in you, whether the narrator admits it or not. The Tonal and the Nagual. The room of description and the vastness beyond it. Every retreat I have ever done has been an attempt to push people past the Tonal and into the Nagual, past the personality and into the raw fact of being alive without a story. And every retreat has pushed them to the edge but not fully through. The door opens partway. They see the light and the light terrifies them and they retreat back into description and call the retreat transformational and mean it and also miss the point. Mexico is where I stop accepting partway.

The Scripts, or: The Theater You Refused

You remember the nyasas. You remember when I taught you the spin-off of Advaita Vedanta, working with primary and secondary thought, Pratamika and Vaikrita, the raw experience versus the interpretation of the experience. You said I did not transmit the lineage purely. You criticized me for the very innovation that made the work alive and relevant to modern humans rather than a museum piece recited in Sanskrit to people who would never feel it in their bodies. Your intellectual mind rejected it. Your body swallowed it whole. Here is what that innovation does. The person begins with a sentence that describes their wound. I feel humiliated. I feel exploited. I feel invisible. Then they modulate it. I enjoy being humiliated. I deserve to be exploited. I choose to be invisible. The sentence turns and turns, the hand writes what the mind would censor, the exaggeration pushes the idea past logic into absurdity and past absurdity into something that suddenly rings like a bell. A primary emerges. Not a thought about the wound. The wound itself, speaking in its own language for the first time.

In Mexico this becomes theater. Everyone writes from the unspeakable place. Everyone performs everyone else's unspeakable truth. Your deepest shame walks around in someone else's body while their deepest shame walks around in yours. The scripts can go anywhere. Sexual, violent, absurd, tender, pornographic, holy. The primary layer does not respect the categories that the secondary mind uses to keep itself comfortable. The group becomes a theater company staging the unconscious, and its stage is a private house in Mexico City, and there is no audience because everyone is simultaneously actor and witness. Your whole life is built on roles, Persephone. You know how to become whoever the room needs. That is your genius and your prison. In Mexico we will play the real roles. The ones you rejected. The ones that cannot be performed because they are not roles at all but the thing underneath all roles. And you will not be there.

The French Shaman Chemist

There is a man I will not name. I will call him the French shaman chemist because the label is accurate and because his privacy matters more than this essay's desire for specificity. He is not a shaman in the way that word has been degraded by the retreat industry. He is not a chemist in the academic sense. He is a European who has achieved what I thought was impossible: a total understanding of tryptamine molecular variations and their specific neurological architectures, combined with the intuition of someone who can look at a human being and know which key fits which lock. What makes him different from every psychedelic facilitator I have ever encountered is precision. The ayahuasca industry hands everyone the same brew and hopes the universe sorts it out. The mushroom ceremony gives everyone the same dose and calls it surrender. He does something else entirely. He reads the project the way a conductor reads a score. He sees the specific doorway that needs to open and selects the specific molecular variation, at the specific dosage, calibrated to the specific ritual being performed at that specific moment in the sequence. The substance is tuned to the sadhana. Not the other way around.

In Mexico his work is the third layer on top of two layers that have already been working for weeks. The kriyas have been opening the nervous system daily. The scripts have fractured the social armor. The partner practices have dissolved the boundary between self and other to the point where the room is functioning as a single respiratory system. Into this prepared ground, at the right moment, inside the right ritual, perhaps the Pashuvat Puja, the Animal Puja, the one that activates the creature layer of consciousness that civilization spent ten thousand years burying, he introduces the molecular key. And the key does not create the experience. It allows the person to remain inside an experience that the kriyas have already opened, long enough for the narrator to lose its grip entirely. Long enough for the animal god kingdom, the ancestral intelligence encoded in the DNA, the memory that predates language, to finally speak. This is what I think happens. People forget who they are. Not in the dissociative sense. In the sense that the narrator stops. And what emerges is not chaos. It is the creature. The thing Nastassja Kinski became in that 1982 film when she stopped resisting her bloodline. The thing that every domesticated human carries in their cells and cannot access because the civilizing machinery runs a continuous loop of description that drowns out the older signal. I know what you are thinking as you read this because I know how you think. You are thinking about risk. You are thinking about reputation. You are thinking I should not write about this publicly. And all of that thinking is the Tonal doing its job, managing and protecting and reducing the vast to the safe. Everything gets misused. Sex gets misused. What I gave went somewhere I did not intend. And still the work has to be done. Inside sealed containers. Inside a laboratory of people who trust each other. Not preaching. Investigating. If you cannot tell the difference between investigation and recklessness, that is your limitation, not mine.

The Lineage That Men Were Never Meant to Hold

Let me teach you something you already know, since teaching you things you already know and then watching them reappear later as your own discoveries has been one of the recurring comedies of our relationship. The left-handed Shakta traditions, the Vamacara, organized power along an axis that the modern world has completely inverted. The woman was not the receptive principle. She was the source. She carried in her body, in her menstrual blood, in her sexual fluids, in the rhythmic biological cycle of creation and destruction that her womb performed every month without a single kriya needed, the direct channel to Shakti. The cosmic creative power that built reality and maintains it. A male practitioner could sit for decades doing pranayama, refining his seed, mastering the breathwork and the visualizations and the intricate architecture of kriya yoga, and he would still need her. Because what she carried was not cultivated. It was inherent. Her biology was already doing what he spent his life trying to force through technique. She did not need to awaken anything. She needed to be initiated into knowing what she already had. You know what you have. I initiated you into knowing it. I showed you what your body was already doing and you recognized it instantly because it was never foreign to you, it was just unnamed. And then the name and the knowing and the power became currency in a relationship that was never supposed to have an economy. The ocean got poured into a teacup. The teacup became a life. And now I carry the lineage alone. A man holding what was designed for a woman's body. It is like carrying water in your hands. It leaks constantly. These practices were transmitted mouth to ear, body to body, across centuries in a lineage that nearly vanished. They appear nowhere in the published literature. Not in the Hatha Yoga Pradipika, not in the Gheranda Samhita, not in any Bengali Shakta manuscript, not in any Tibetan archive. Scholars cannot find them because they were never written down. What I carry is what survived. And I was never supposed to be the one carrying it. You were. Why do men carry this burden of a lineage? Because someone had to take over the job of preservation when the feminine forgot. The feminine forgot what it was for. And someone had to remember.

The Primordial Ocean

We came from the primordial ocean. You and I. Two molecules of yin and yang spinning in the same current since before there were names for currents or molecules or spinning. And our horoscope, the one we ran through every system, Vedic and Western and Human Design, says the same thing in every language. Either we destroy each other and regret it across lifetimes, or we fuse the enormous energy we have carried since the beginning of time into something that serves humanity. There is no middle option. There is no let's be friends. The energy is too large. It will either create or destroy. It does not have a neutral gear. You told me this from the start. We are not meant to live together every hour of the day. We are not a domestic arrangement. We are a project. A cosmic engineering problem that happens to involve two people who also happen to be in love, which complicates everything because love makes you stupid and cosmic engineering requires precision. We are here for something else. Something that uses our love as fuel but is not reducible to our love. And acceptance would have meant surrendering control. Control is the last fortress. The final room in the Tonal. The one that gets defended even as the building burns down around it. And still, despite the spider, the mantis, the dismantling, the borrowed voices, despite all of it, I would want nothing more than to marry you. This sentence makes no logical sense. A man writing a public essay about a tantric retreat who suddenly says he wants to marry the woman who destroyed him. It makes no sense because logic belongs to the Tonal and the Tonal has never understood a single important thing about being alive.

Why I Am Writing This to You and Not to Them

I was supposed to write a marketing essay. Five spots. Thirty thousand dollars. Here is what you will experience. I have written that essay fifteen times and it is always true and always dead. It is dead because it comes from the Tonal. From the part of me that knows how to organize information and present it persuasively and hit the emotional notes that make people reach for their wallets. I am good at this. I hate that I am good at this. The part of me that is good at this is the part of me that you said was not the real me, and for once, love of my life, you were right about something you said while dismantling me. So I am writing to you instead. Because when I write to you I cannot fake. When I write to you the narrator shuts up because the narrator is afraid of you. You saw through every performance, every spiritual persona, every guru mask, every polished version. You saw the man underneath and for a while you loved him and then you decided he was not enough. But the seeing was real. And writing to you puts me back inside the seeing. Which means that for the first time, the reader is getting me instead of my narrator. This is what a real guru is. Since we are on the subject and since I am hemorrhaging in print. A real guru, and there are almost none, is true to himself. He does not fake. He is one person. He is the Tonal and the Nagual merged into one. The description and the vastness, the personality and the void, the human and the animal, all of it operating through a single nervous system without walls between departments. And then he becomes formless. You made me formless, Persephone. You made me everything. And then you left and I solidified again and the solidification is what I am trying to break through in Mexico, and in this letter, and in whatever life I have left.

The People I Am Looking For

Since you will not be there, let me describe who will be. I am looking for people who have done everything and still feel the absence. Not the absence of something they can name. The absence underneath everything. Something that feels less like a desire and more like a memory, as if the body remembers a state of consciousness it once had access to and lost, not through personal failure but through the collective agreement to be civilized, to be describable, to be a person rather than a force.

I am looking for placeholder actors. Musicians, dancers, models, actors, healers, therapists, sex workers, martial artists, witches, nobodies with extraordinary nervous systems. Unhinged and smart. Willing to disappear inside something with no precedent and no safety net. No cost. Full participation. Same transmission, same practices, same dissolution.

The World, the Throne, and What Remains

I wrote this in February 2026, sitting in Bangkok, thinking of you. The world is not kind right now. Borders are closing. People are retreating into smaller and smaller certainties. Everyone is streamlined. Everyone behaves like software running code they did not write. Artificial intelligence is learning to sound human at the exact moment that humans are forgetting how to sound like themselves. Nobody speaks their own truth because speaking your truth requires first knowing what it is, and knowing what it is requires the kind of excavation that the modern world has replaced with therapy apps and breathwork playlists on Spotify. The paradise condition is right there. Built into the hardware. The human nervous system was designed for states of consciousness that make ordinary waking life look like a photograph of a sunset shown to someone who has never been outside. The mystics mapped these states. The tantric lineages built technologies to access them. And then civilization paved over all of it and sold the rubble as wellness. I refuse. I refuse to be streamlined. I refuse to write a marketing essay about Mexico when what wants to come out is a love letter to a woman who broke me and made me and broke me again and whose absence is the engine of the most important thing I have ever built. The portal opens in July. The throne will be there. Someone will sit on it.

It should have been you, Persephone.

And here we are, at war, when all of this, every accusation, every wound, every terrible beautiful thing between us, should have been the material. Should have gone into the container. Should have been performed, not lived. Should have burned through until what was left was not two people fighting but two currents remembering that they were always one current, and the one current is love, and the love is not a feeling but the fabric of existence, and sitting inside that fabric, next to the tree of life, next to the creator God, as his children, as his offspring, as two molecules that have been spinning together since the primordial ocean, we would have finally stopped performing and started being. In the last year you reject me, my philosophy, my ideas, my sun sign, my moon sign, my rising sign. Yet all of it breathes in your veins. It lives in your cells. That is the sadness I cannot live with. You assimilated me. I became part of you. But something will not let you see that all of you lives in me and all of me lives in you. We have played this game since the beginning of time. Perhaps in another lifetime the constellation was better. There will never be a better constellation than this one. I told you that from the start.

And still, despite everything, I would want nothing more than to marry you.

Michael Wogenburg, Bangkok, February 2026

Sensual Liberation Retreat, Mexico City, July 2026
One month. Five open spots at $30,000. Placeholder actor casting open.
forbidden-yoga.com/SLR_Mexico
love@forbidden-yoga.com